82mm mortar started coming in on us.

It's like, what is that?

That's incoming mortar and artillery rounds.

We were engaged in a complex ambush from both sides.

An enemy force, unknown numbers engaged both sides of my rear vehicle,

so they targeted my rear vehicles with RPGs and heavy machine guns.

I was in the lead vehicle.

I had never experienced much chaos as I did at that time.

I just didn't know what was going on.

Hi, and thanks for listening to another episode of The Spear, a podcast by the Modern War Institute at West Point.

I'm John Amble, editorial director at MWI, and this podcast, The Spear, is our platform to explore the combat experience.

Each episode includes a single one-on-one interview with a guest who walks us through a particular event and they're role in it.

A battle, a firefight, a mission.

It's a first-person account of combat.

This episode features a conversation I had with John Spencer, who many listeners

will know because he's been part of MWI since the organization was created and is our expert on

all things urban warfare. But back in 2003, he was a platoon leader with the 173rd Airborne in

northern Iraq. You're about to hear him talk through two separate events from that deployment.

First, the very first mission he led his platoon on, and second, a complex ambush conducted by enemy forces against his platoon.

They're both incredible stories of combat in their own right, but he also reflects on some really interesting comparisons between the two.

A couple notes before we get into the conversation.

First, this was one of the very first episodes we ran last year when we launched the Spear,

...